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Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

71 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

ploppyploppy 4y ago
Good. DEI is evil and a cancer on our society.
gowld 4y ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520502
endominus 4y ago
Unpaywalled link; https://archive.is/oAuZH https://archive.is/oAuZH
eli_gottlieb 4y ago
>Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively. So the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  The stat isn't even about layoffs. It's about number of open job postings.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  The full quote gives some important context: > Listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a bigger decline than legal or general human resources jobs saw, according to findings from Textio, which helps companies create unbiased job ads. Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively. I'm guessing these were listings Textio was paid to analyze, so there are multiple possible causes for the decline.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
D/I initiatives need strong government/industry collaboration, because the benefits of success are shared by society, but the investment takes decades from filling the pipelines starting in elementary school.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  It's unclear what D&I consultants can do in order to conjure more non-Asian computer science students out of thin air to fill that pipeline.
  - zenzen 4y ago
    It’s not a pipeline problem https://www.fastcompany.com/90596325/its-time-to-debunk-the-pipeline-problem-once-and-for-all https://www.fastcompany.com/90596325/its-time-to-debunk-the-...
    - mcrib 4y ago
      looks like you gotta listen to a whole podcast here, do you mind summarizing the points? the research I've looked at mostly has been around number of graduates in certain fields which would seem to lend credence to it being a pipeline problem, at least so far down stream. would love to hear evidence on the other side. thank you.
    - kenjackson 4y ago
      I didn't listen to the full podcast, but as someone who has spent much of my work time in the past few years trying to hire -- it seems surprising to hear its not a pipeline problem. I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants. In fairness it wasn't easy to find White or Asian qualified applicants too, but still found disproportionately more. My biggest fear is that if we try to sweep the pipeline problem under the rug, we're not going to fix it. I do have a potential solution, but I think it's a tough sell...
      - 4y ago
daveslash 4y ago
"Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go." I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Illegal at the federal level, no?
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    I believe it depends on which race, gender or ethnicity is being let go.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Yes, but I appreciate it when people are so deep in their field that they innocently spout off ideas like this. It's also a little sloppy for Bloomberg to let that get by since it almost encourages something that's possibly illegal.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      I think we just found where the root of the disconnect between a certain "victimized" demographic and how D&I works stems from: As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect" The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick. - And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature. It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency. Similarly even though they're not sexist, they're not a T-1000 and are subject to things like same-gender preferences that have been replicated time and time again: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01863/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0186... A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.
nDIgger 4y ago
[dead]
elektrontamer 4y ago
The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister. Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector is relatively safe. When you bring in DEI positions you're just creating new opening for the politicians/activists to exert control over the private sector as well.
- poszlem 4y ago
  I don't understand why anybody would be against having political commissars at their place of work. Did we not learn from Soviet Russia that those work great?
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    I recently read an interesting book called "Ivan's War" that is an in depth look at WW2 from the Soviet side that extensively draws on 1st hand sources. One of the things I found so interesting was that much of the Soviet framework was built upon ensuring you couldn't trust anyone, putting spies amongst military units to rat on their comrades, splitting apart units that had served together for a while, etc. The whole point wasn't to control thought, or stamp out disloyalty it was merely to make each person feel like they were alone and isolated. I have to wonder how much of some of these culture war issues have been brought into corporations in order to prevent the workers from organizing.
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc? Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?
  - kneebonian 4y ago
kypro 4y ago
I predicted this would likely happen at the start of the year. I don't think it was an accident that tech become one of the main industries pushing D&I over the last several years. Whatever your opinion is on D&I it's arguably not something a company would put significant investment or time into unless they had spare margin and cashflows. This isn't a political comment, just an observation as someone who works for a company with a large D&I team, but I do hope this injects some sanity into what a reasonable emphasis on D&I looks like in the corporate structure, because I think a few tech companies have gone a little too far in recent years. The company I work for at the moment has ended up dividing the workforce by race by pushing "inclusive" policies so hard. Our corporate Yammer is worse than Twitter.
- dijit 4y ago
  My, perhaps bitter, opinion is that D&I was pushed heavily by tech to get more workers in so that wages could be suppressed. The layoffs happening across all tech companies (including the ones recording record profits and that have extremely large cash reserves) also strikes me as another way of depressing tech salaries. Maybe this perspective doesn't hold much weight, because why then get rid of D&I? Maybe because keeping the lights on is more important, or D&I has already done as much as it could do, if that was the ambition.
  - kypro 4y ago
    The reason I thought D&I teams would get cut is because I believe in a lot of companies today these departments are reducing productivity and workplace satisfaction. No one wants to work for a company where you're likelihood of being promoted is, in part, dependant on having the right immutable characteristics. The issue is when times are good and companies are expanding it's hard to justify why you're suddenly cutting people who work in D&I roles. And you can't even freeze their hiring because even that looks bad when every other department is still growing their headcount 10% YoY. But now for the first time in many years tech companies have an excuse to cut fat - so who are they going to cut? Well, it's not going to be the engineer who's been their for 10+ years who has built several essential tools and services. It's generally going to be teams who work on speculative innovation projects that are likely going nowhere and those from departments offering little value to the company such as D&I. My opinion on the tech layoffs from the start has been that if you're a good engineer who's providing value, or is able to provide value elsewhere, it's unlikely you'll be impacted much. Even if you're let go.
therealestbizzy 4y ago
My favorite part of the diversity sham is the race selector on the Bumble dating app. Asian has 5/6 options with all cardinal directions included. Yet White has one option. Certainly just like the South Asian is different than the North Asian you get the picture. Also the Greek European is different than the Norwegian. You get the picture. Also the chess.com emoticon selector. If you don't pay you have to be OK with no emoticon or 2 icons which are Pro Ukraine. If you pay you have access to all emoticons. Not quite sure exactly what the message is there, but doesn't really go well with freedom of choice. Especially when you have a platform which has a huge minor audience. I guess chess.com has bigger problems not that their site is suffering under extreme load due to poor planning.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  This seems off topic?
vanjajaja1 4y ago
I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs'. eg the quotes from comments: > "Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go." > 'Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively.' So the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I don't know if we should read too much into this, it seems like the kind of thing you'd expect in any subspecialty. "Widget polishers are being hit hard by layoffs; we talked to some widget polishers, and they all told us that this is a big problem because it's important for the widgets to be polished."
- lordfrito 4y ago
  > I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs' A job that's immune to layoffs, sign me up! /s Seriously however, it seems to me that DEI positions are mainly about virtue signaling. The positions certainly don't have anything to do with a companies core competencies or products (you know, their actual business). So it's pure overhead. Wasn't this stuff traditionally handled by HR? As other's have pointed out, there are already laws on the books that must be followed, and plenty of precedent showing large $$$ payouts when the rules aren't being followed. If/when jobs like this become mandatory, then a new bureaucracy will emerge and spread like a cancer, the overhead hanging like a millstone around a companies ability to stay competitive. You're seeing this happen on universities, where the staff/student ratio continues to grow, raising tuition and reducing the value of the education. I worry about the future competitive value American companies will bring to the global economy.
turtlesdown11 4y ago
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our... > Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation. In our 2017 data set, we found a positive correlation between gender diversity on executive teams and both our measures of financial performance: top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 percent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quartile industry peers on EBIT margin, and they also had a 27 percent likelihood of outperforming fourth-quartile peers on longer-term value creation, as measured using an economic-profit (EP) margin (Exhibit 2). > Top-team ethnic and cultural diversity is correlated with profitability. In our 2017 data set, we looked at racial and cultural diversity in six countries where the definition of ethnic diversity was consistent and our data were reliable.1 As in 2014, we found that companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams—not only with respect to absolute representation but also of variety or mix of ethnicities2 —are 33 percent more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. That’s comparable to the 35 percent outperformance reported in 2014, with both figures being statistically significant (Exhibit 4).
- lazyeye 4y ago
  I simply do not trust these kind of statistics. Almost without exception the only people doing this kind of research are activists with an agenda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning Not saying its true, not saying its not.
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-at-work/201706/is-your-companys-diversity-training-making-you-more-biased https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-at-work/2... > Inclusion programs often trigger an “us versus them” mindset. > Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend. > One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review, “and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.”
silisili 4y ago
My previous company got rid of DEI stuff a couple years back, when the previous CEO left. Only one or two people even noticed, and one had the nerve to complain on an all hands. The CEO said 'listen, we don't have the time or money for stuff like that right now. We're not profitable. Let's turn this ship around and we'll revisit.' This gave me the sense that it's just seen as a frivolous expense to most companies, and pretty big respect to the CEO for admitting as much.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I've always taken a lot of the D&I stuff as a rainbow capitalism and liability thing. The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training. Whereas that stuff is very rarely perpetrated by the rank and final, it's usually the execs that need the training. Why is DIE any different, after all if it was really important to the execs there would be easy ways to make it happen, shoving everyone in trainings seems like performative work.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    > The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training. Which makes perfect sense as these are the people who making hiring decisions and are in places to take bribes and blackmail others for sexual favors; the CEO of a large org isn't doing interviews for rank and file.
testfoobar 4y ago
DEI departments and projects have a fervor to them that is near religious: the core tenets are faith based and impossible to challenge scientifically. Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out. The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism. Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.
- tristor 4y ago
  > Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out. The one that continually upsets me (as someone who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community, is married to a Hispanic person, has Hispanic children, and speaks Spanish as a fluent second language and in the home) is the use of the term "LatinX" which has spread through the DEI community and now general HR. I, a white man, despite my involvement in Latin culture cannot push back against this offensive term, which is quite literally colonialistic with white people from other countries (mostly Americans) telling Latin PoC globally what the appropriate term is to self-identify with. I've attempted to do so, and it's gotten me in trouble, despite the truth and cultural basis of my arguments. DEI would be questionable but not objectionable if it only pushed actual factual truth, but because it's mostly subjective ideological zealotry, it's incredibly objectionable, and actually racist, more racist than those who are in opposition to it, but seems to have been granted a monopoly on determining what is and isn't racist or unacceptable by the Western elites.
  - gowld 4y ago
    https://www.ketv.com/article/omaha-latinx-organizations-share-hopes-for-futuro-latino-fund/42720767 https://www.ketv.com/article/omaha-latinx-organizations-shar... > "Latinx organizations share hopes for Futuro Latino Fund" > The grant is meant for nonprofits and organizations that help support Latinx communities. > Garcia said Latinx people understanding their history is important for community development. > "As Chicanos, as we grew up understanding that America, the United States of America, era nuestra casa, we became interested and connected to American history," he said. > A lot of Latinos would love to be baseball,
anyonecancode 4y ago
I always found the idea of DEI positions underwhelming. It's as if company had a VP of Tech Debt, or a Chief Accessibility Officer. My conclusion would be that code quality and accessibility aren't actually that important to such a company.
lazyeye 4y ago
Curious..is DEI purely a western phenomenon? Are there many examples of DEI policies being implemented in non-Western countries?
- timellis-smith 4y ago
  See the Employment equity act, BEE, BBBEE in South Africa
  - lazyeye 4y ago
    Interesting....although arguably you could see how SA might be considered a special case due to its history.
- thefz 4y ago
  More than Western, I'd say American. It is way more dim in the EU.
ding_dang 4y ago
ITT: People waking up to what happens when your HR department is staffed with predominantly liberal white women. Wait til you find out how promotions work. It’s one heck of an affair!
- forshowjimbean 4y ago
  [flagged]
alephnerd 4y ago
While there are 100% are issues and abuses of power due to how DEI is managed in the private sector, I find it annoying how these threads in HN always throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are successful diversity hiring programs and proactive management, but you don't hear about those as much because outrage sells. Hell, people from my background were underrepresented when I was working on the Hill and I wished there was more DEI in staffer hiring. The bigger issue in my honest opinion is how companies treat HR as an amaphorous cost center. It's the same as non-tech companies that underinvest and treat IT like shit because they don't understand the function. The lack of mutual respect across different domains and roles here on HN is jarring and honestly very toxic. This is sophmoric commentary that I honestly could simulate with a Naive Bayes language model (not even ChatGPT).
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  I’ve found it’s impossible to have a fair and constructive conversation about diversity on HN.
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    Sadly it seems to be the case. I'm at -4 karma at this point for my comment above. This forum has literally become a Gen X version Reddit. Hell, I'm not even denying that hiring abuses under the guise of DEI occur, but to downvote a call for constructive discussion is just ridiculous
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/oAuZH https://archive.ph/oAuZH
mancerayder 4y ago
What is the end goal, end state of DEI programs ? Once the numbers (quotas, designated equity proportions, etc.) are reached, are DEI administrators then thinned out ? I'm talking a future, theoretical situation. In order to answer 'what happens when the goals are met' we first need to establish what are the goals and then see if they are transparent from the outset or loose and forever adapting. If not then the risk is a future self-important bureaucratic arm that exists for its own sake. The answer can't possibly be, "they will forever be needed due to the racist and sexist nature of society" because now we're saying something interesting and possibly self-contradictory about our natures (we're not supposed to have natures, we're products of society/class/culture, is the foundational belief of the DEI ideas as they must be). Therefore an end goal is a must-have.
- tharne 4y ago
  > Therefore an end goal is a must-have. I agree, but this will never ever happen, which is one of the many reasons these programs are unethical money pits that only benefit people who make a career out of DEI. If you're head of DEI at a fortune 500, you're likely getting at least $500k a year in total compensation; more at some companies. Given that reality, it's only human nature to convince yourself that doing that particular job in perpetuity is massively important. Here's what will happen instead. If they start to hit their initial goals, they'll just move the goalposts. Mostly likely these will be in the form of slicing and dicing workers into ever smaller groups - you can always find a group within a group. Let's say that the DEI group at $BIG_CORP gets it so that workers from group X are represented at the company in a way that matches the proportion of the overall population they comprise. The folks in DEI will just say, "Oh no, we've made great progress with group X, but we don't have enough people in group X from the LGBTQ community; more work must be done, more money must be spent!" So, they get the LBGTQ numbers up for group X. "Oh, No!", they say, "We don't have enough people from group X who are disabled; more work must be done, more money must be spent!". The point is not, and never was, to accomplish a goal. It's to make it appear that progress toward a vaguely-state goal of diversity is continuously being made, while also making sure never to actually accomplish the goal; less the make-work jobs and juicy consulting contracts dry up. And honestly, I can't blame these folks. If I had a half million dollar a year job, I'd also find a way to keep it as long as I possibly could.
Bancakes 4y ago
(And that’s a good thing!)

71 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

ploppyploppy 4y ago

Good. DEI is evil and a cancer on our society.

gowld 4y ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520502

endominus 4y ago

Unpaywalled link; https://archive.is/oAuZH https://archive.is/oAuZH

eli_gottlieb 4y ago

>Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively. So the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
The stat isn't even about layoffs. It's about number of open job postings.
dehrmann 4y ago
The full quote gives some important context: > Listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a bigger decline than legal or general human resources jobs saw, according to findings from Textio, which helps companies create unbiased job ads. Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively. I'm guessing these were listings Textio was paid to analyze, so there are multiple possible causes for the decline.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

D/I initiatives need strong government/industry collaboration, because the benefits of success are shared by society, but the investment takes decades from filling the pipelines starting in elementary school.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
It's unclear what D&I consultants can do in order to conjure more non-Asian computer science students out of thin air to fill that pipeline.
- zenzen 4y ago
  It’s not a pipeline problem https://www.fastcompany.com/90596325/its-time-to-debunk-the-pipeline-problem-once-and-for-all https://www.fastcompany.com/90596325/its-time-to-debunk-the-...
  - mcrib 4y ago
    looks like you gotta listen to a whole podcast here, do you mind summarizing the points? the research I've looked at mostly has been around number of graduates in certain fields which would seem to lend credence to it being a pipeline problem, at least so far down stream. would love to hear evidence on the other side. thank you.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    I didn't listen to the full podcast, but as someone who has spent much of my work time in the past few years trying to hire -- it seems surprising to hear its not a pipeline problem. I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants. In fairness it wasn't easy to find White or Asian qualified applicants too, but still found disproportionately more. My biggest fear is that if we try to sweep the pipeline problem under the rug, we're not going to fix it. I do have a potential solution, but I think it's a tough sell...
    - 4y ago

daveslash 4y ago

"Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go." I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Illegal at the federal level, no?
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  I believe it depends on which race, gender or ethnicity is being let go.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Yes, but I appreciate it when people are so deep in their field that they innocently spout off ideas like this. It's also a little sloppy for Bloomberg to let that get by since it almost encourages something that's possibly illegal.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    I think we just found where the root of the disconnect between a certain "victimized" demographic and how D&I works stems from: As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect" The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick. - And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature. It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency. Similarly even though they're not sexist, they're not a T-1000 and are subject to things like same-gender preferences that have been replicated time and time again: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01863/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0186... A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.

nDIgger 4y ago

[dead]

elektrontamer 4y ago

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister. Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector is relatively safe. When you bring in DEI positions you're just creating new opening for the politicians/activists to exert control over the private sector as well.

poszlem 4y ago
I don't understand why anybody would be against having political commissars at their place of work. Did we not learn from Soviet Russia that those work great?
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I recently read an interesting book called "Ivan's War" that is an in depth look at WW2 from the Soviet side that extensively draws on 1st hand sources. One of the things I found so interesting was that much of the Soviet framework was built upon ensuring you couldn't trust anyone, putting spies amongst military units to rat on their comrades, splitting apart units that had served together for a while, etc. The whole point wasn't to control thought, or stamp out disloyalty it was merely to make each person feel like they were alone and isolated. I have to wonder how much of some of these culture war issues have been brought into corporations in order to prevent the workers from organizing.
scottiebarnes 4y ago
The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc? Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?
- kneebonian 4y ago

kypro 4y ago

I predicted this would likely happen at the start of the year. I don't think it was an accident that tech become one of the main industries pushing D&I over the last several years. Whatever your opinion is on D&I it's arguably not something a company would put significant investment or time into unless they had spare margin and cashflows. This isn't a political comment, just an observation as someone who works for a company with a large D&I team, but I do hope this injects some sanity into what a reasonable emphasis on D&I looks like in the corporate structure, because I think a few tech companies have gone a little too far in recent years. The company I work for at the moment has ended up dividing the workforce by race by pushing "inclusive" policies so hard. Our corporate Yammer is worse than Twitter.

dijit 4y ago
My, perhaps bitter, opinion is that D&I was pushed heavily by tech to get more workers in so that wages could be suppressed. The layoffs happening across all tech companies (including the ones recording record profits and that have extremely large cash reserves) also strikes me as another way of depressing tech salaries. Maybe this perspective doesn't hold much weight, because why then get rid of D&I? Maybe because keeping the lights on is more important, or D&I has already done as much as it could do, if that was the ambition.
- kypro 4y ago
  The reason I thought D&I teams would get cut is because I believe in a lot of companies today these departments are reducing productivity and workplace satisfaction. No one wants to work for a company where you're likelihood of being promoted is, in part, dependant on having the right immutable characteristics. The issue is when times are good and companies are expanding it's hard to justify why you're suddenly cutting people who work in D&I roles. And you can't even freeze their hiring because even that looks bad when every other department is still growing their headcount 10% YoY. But now for the first time in many years tech companies have an excuse to cut fat - so who are they going to cut? Well, it's not going to be the engineer who's been their for 10+ years who has built several essential tools and services. It's generally going to be teams who work on speculative innovation projects that are likely going nowhere and those from departments offering little value to the company such as D&I. My opinion on the tech layoffs from the start has been that if you're a good engineer who's providing value, or is able to provide value elsewhere, it's unlikely you'll be impacted much. Even if you're let go.

therealestbizzy 4y ago

My favorite part of the diversity sham is the race selector on the Bumble dating app. Asian has 5/6 options with all cardinal directions included. Yet White has one option. Certainly just like the South Asian is different than the North Asian you get the picture. Also the Greek European is different than the Norwegian. You get the picture. Also the chess.com emoticon selector. If you don't pay you have to be OK with no emoticon or 2 icons which are Pro Ukraine. If you pay you have access to all emoticons. Not quite sure exactly what the message is there, but doesn't really go well with freedom of choice. Especially when you have a platform which has a huge minor audience. I guess chess.com has bigger problems not that their site is suffering under extreme load due to poor planning.

Invictus0 4y ago
This seems off topic?

vanjajaja1 4y ago

I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs'. eg the quotes from comments: > "Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go." > 'Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively.' So the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
I don't know if we should read too much into this, it seems like the kind of thing you'd expect in any subspecialty. "Widget polishers are being hit hard by layoffs; we talked to some widget polishers, and they all told us that this is a big problem because it's important for the widgets to be polished."
lordfrito 4y ago
> I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs' A job that's immune to layoffs, sign me up! /s Seriously however, it seems to me that DEI positions are mainly about virtue signaling. The positions certainly don't have anything to do with a companies core competencies or products (you know, their actual business). So it's pure overhead. Wasn't this stuff traditionally handled by HR? As other's have pointed out, there are already laws on the books that must be followed, and plenty of precedent showing large $$$ payouts when the rules aren't being followed. If/when jobs like this become mandatory, then a new bureaucracy will emerge and spread like a cancer, the overhead hanging like a millstone around a companies ability to stay competitive. You're seeing this happen on universities, where the staff/student ratio continues to grow, raising tuition and reducing the value of the education. I worry about the future competitive value American companies will bring to the global economy.

turtlesdown11 4y ago

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our... > Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation. In our 2017 data set, we found a positive correlation between gender diversity on executive teams and both our measures of financial performance: top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 percent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quartile industry peers on EBIT margin, and they also had a 27 percent likelihood of outperforming fourth-quartile peers on longer-term value creation, as measured using an economic-profit (EP) margin (Exhibit 2). > Top-team ethnic and cultural diversity is correlated with profitability. In our 2017 data set, we looked at racial and cultural diversity in six countries where the definition of ethnic diversity was consistent and our data were reliable.1 As in 2014, we found that companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams—not only with respect to absolute representation but also of variety or mix of ethnicities2 —are 33 percent more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. That’s comparable to the 35 percent outperformance reported in 2014, with both figures being statistically significant (Exhibit 4).

lazyeye 4y ago
I simply do not trust these kind of statistics. Almost without exception the only people doing this kind of research are activists with an agenda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning Not saying its true, not saying its not.
scifibestfi 4y ago
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-at-work/201706/is-your-companys-diversity-training-making-you-more-biased https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-at-work/2... > Inclusion programs often trigger an “us versus them” mindset. > Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend. > One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review, “and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.”

silisili 4y ago

My previous company got rid of DEI stuff a couple years back, when the previous CEO left. Only one or two people even noticed, and one had the nerve to complain on an all hands. The CEO said 'listen, we don't have the time or money for stuff like that right now. We're not profitable. Let's turn this ship around and we'll revisit.' This gave me the sense that it's just seen as a frivolous expense to most companies, and pretty big respect to the CEO for admitting as much.

kneebonian 4y ago
I've always taken a lot of the D&I stuff as a rainbow capitalism and liability thing. The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training. Whereas that stuff is very rarely perpetrated by the rank and final, it's usually the execs that need the training. Why is DIE any different, after all if it was really important to the execs there would be easy ways to make it happen, shoving everyone in trainings seems like performative work.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  > The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training. Which makes perfect sense as these are the people who making hiring decisions and are in places to take bribes and blackmail others for sexual favors; the CEO of a large org isn't doing interviews for rank and file.

testfoobar 4y ago

DEI departments and projects have a fervor to them that is near religious: the core tenets are faith based and impossible to challenge scientifically. Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out. The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism. Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.

tristor 4y ago
> Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out. The one that continually upsets me (as someone who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community, is married to a Hispanic person, has Hispanic children, and speaks Spanish as a fluent second language and in the home) is the use of the term "LatinX" which has spread through the DEI community and now general HR. I, a white man, despite my involvement in Latin culture cannot push back against this offensive term, which is quite literally colonialistic with white people from other countries (mostly Americans) telling Latin PoC globally what the appropriate term is to self-identify with. I've attempted to do so, and it's gotten me in trouble, despite the truth and cultural basis of my arguments. DEI would be questionable but not objectionable if it only pushed actual factual truth, but because it's mostly subjective ideological zealotry, it's incredibly objectionable, and actually racist, more racist than those who are in opposition to it, but seems to have been granted a monopoly on determining what is and isn't racist or unacceptable by the Western elites.
- gowld 4y ago
  https://www.ketv.com/article/omaha-latinx-organizations-share-hopes-for-futuro-latino-fund/42720767 https://www.ketv.com/article/omaha-latinx-organizations-shar... > "Latinx organizations share hopes for Futuro Latino Fund" > The grant is meant for nonprofits and organizations that help support Latinx communities. > Garcia said Latinx people understanding their history is important for community development. > "As Chicanos, as we grew up understanding that America, the United States of America, era nuestra casa, we became interested and connected to American history," he said. > A lot of Latinos would love to be baseball,

anyonecancode 4y ago

I always found the idea of DEI positions underwhelming. It's as if company had a VP of Tech Debt, or a Chief Accessibility Officer. My conclusion would be that code quality and accessibility aren't actually that important to such a company.

lazyeye 4y ago

Curious..is DEI purely a western phenomenon? Are there many examples of DEI policies being implemented in non-Western countries?

timellis-smith 4y ago
See the Employment equity act, BEE, BBBEE in South Africa
- lazyeye 4y ago
  Interesting....although arguably you could see how SA might be considered a special case due to its history.
thefz 4y ago
More than Western, I'd say American. It is way more dim in the EU.

ding_dang 4y ago

ITT: People waking up to what happens when your HR department is staffed with predominantly liberal white women. Wait til you find out how promotions work. It’s one heck of an affair!

forshowjimbean 4y ago
[flagged]

alephnerd 4y ago

While there are 100% are issues and abuses of power due to how DEI is managed in the private sector, I find it annoying how these threads in HN always throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are successful diversity hiring programs and proactive management, but you don't hear about those as much because outrage sells. Hell, people from my background were underrepresented when I was working on the Hill and I wished there was more DEI in staffer hiring. The bigger issue in my honest opinion is how companies treat HR as an amaphorous cost center. It's the same as non-tech companies that underinvest and treat IT like shit because they don't understand the function. The lack of mutual respect across different domains and roles here on HN is jarring and honestly very toxic. This is sophmoric commentary that I honestly could simulate with a Naive Bayes language model (not even ChatGPT).

alphabettsy 4y ago
I’ve found it’s impossible to have a fair and constructive conversation about diversity on HN.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  Sadly it seems to be the case. I'm at -4 karma at this point for my comment above. This forum has literally become a Gen X version Reddit. Hell, I'm not even denying that hiring abuses under the guise of DEI occur, but to downvote a call for constructive discussion is just ridiculous

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/oAuZH https://archive.ph/oAuZH

mancerayder 4y ago

What is the end goal, end state of DEI programs ? Once the numbers (quotas, designated equity proportions, etc.) are reached, are DEI administrators then thinned out ? I'm talking a future, theoretical situation. In order to answer 'what happens when the goals are met' we first need to establish what are the goals and then see if they are transparent from the outset or loose and forever adapting. If not then the risk is a future self-important bureaucratic arm that exists for its own sake. The answer can't possibly be, "they will forever be needed due to the racist and sexist nature of society" because now we're saying something interesting and possibly self-contradictory about our natures (we're not supposed to have natures, we're products of society/class/culture, is the foundational belief of the DEI ideas as they must be). Therefore an end goal is a must-have.

tharne 4y ago
> Therefore an end goal is a must-have. I agree, but this will never ever happen, which is one of the many reasons these programs are unethical money pits that only benefit people who make a career out of DEI. If you're head of DEI at a fortune 500, you're likely getting at least $500k a year in total compensation; more at some companies. Given that reality, it's only human nature to convince yourself that doing that particular job in perpetuity is massively important. Here's what will happen instead. If they start to hit their initial goals, they'll just move the goalposts. Mostly likely these will be in the form of slicing and dicing workers into ever smaller groups - you can always find a group within a group. Let's say that the DEI group at $BIG_CORP gets it so that workers from group X are represented at the company in a way that matches the proportion of the overall population they comprise. The folks in DEI will just say, "Oh no, we've made great progress with group X, but we don't have enough people in group X from the LGBTQ community; more work must be done, more money must be spent!" So, they get the LBGTQ numbers up for group X. "Oh, No!", they say, "We don't have enough people from group X who are disabled; more work must be done, more money must be spent!". The point is not, and never was, to accomplish a goal. It's to make it appear that progress toward a vaguely-state goal of diversity is continuously being made, while also making sure never to actually accomplish the goal; less the make-work jobs and juicy consulting contracts dry up. And honestly, I can't blame these folks. If I had a half million dollar a year job, I'd also find a way to keep it as long as I possibly could.

Bancakes 4y ago

(And that’s a good thing!)